Windows Phone 7 Series at SXSW

With a large Windows Phone 7 Series sign calling me I set out to find an actual working example of a new Windows powered phone. With a little finagling was able to sweet talk my way into the Microsoft's blogger lounge at South by Southwest Interactive.

While there seems to be only one example running around here somewhere, which I'm working to track down, there was a demo of the OS on a touch screen TV.

Here are some of the features that stood out....

Winking: this what they seem to be calling the real time updates on the home page tiles. These are awesome and it looks like how the updates look and function depend on the underlying application. For example: text messages show the number of new messages, the social tile shows your friends profile images fade in and out and the Xbox Live tile shows Avatars popping in and out of the tile.


Alphabetical Search: say you're in your contacts and you want to quickly jump to a particular name, i.e. Smith. You can simply click the letter header, it shows the alphabet, then you can click the letter you want. Very slick.

The Calendar: it pulls from multiple calendars and shows the entries in different colors, i.e. personal vs. business.

Some other tidbits: while there wasn't an example, the Microsoft rep confirmed that the text messaging will be threaded. You'll be able to pin searches to the home page creating a new tile so you can quickly get back to them. The example the rep used was a search for BBQ places near your location, mmmm Texas BBQ. That's an extremely useful feature when you're traveling.

From what I've seen so far it's a very well thought out UI, can't wait to get my hands on a real example.

Tags: Microsoft, sxsw, windows mobile, Windows Phone, windows phone 7 series, WindowsMobile, WindowsPhone, WindowsPhone7Series, xbox live, XboxLive